Dead Flesh…

If in doubt rebrand…have IBM completely run out of ideas with their storage offerings? The Spectrum rebrand of their storage offerings feels like the last throw of the dice. And it demonstrates the problems that they currently have.

In fact, it is not all of their storage offerings but appears to be the software offerings? DS8K for example is missing from the line-up but perhaps Spectrum Zombie – the Storage Array that Will Not Die was a step too far. We do however have Spectrum Virtualise; this is a hardware offering offering in the form of SVC currently but is this going to morph into a software offering? There is little reason why it shouldn’t.

But there are also products such as the hardware XIV, the Vxxxx series and also the ESS GPFS appliance that are missing from the Spectrum family? Are we going to see IBM exit these products over time; it feels like the clock is ticking on them?

The DS8K is probably a safe product because of the mainframe support but users of the rest of them are going to be nervous.

Why have IBM managed to completely mess up their storage portfolio? There are still massive gaps in it after all this time; Object Storage, Scalable NAS and indeed an ordinary workaday NAS of their own.

The products they have are generally good; I’ve been a fan of SVC for a long time, a GPFS advocate and a TSM bigot. Products that really work!

I feel sorry for the folks who develop them; they have been let down again and again by their product marketing; the problem isn’t the products!